As the only online Publishing House of the Bucharest University, Contemporary Literature Press is trying with this new volume to retrieve the past of Romanian English Studies.

Like many of the achievements of the Bucharest English Department, the book Shakespeare Criticism was from the start initiated and then put together by Professor Leon Levițchi, who recruited several translators to do the job, one different translator for each century. It was a special Edition, marking 400 years since 1564, the year William Shakespeare was born.

This book, here reissued in three volumes of facsimile, includes criticism of Shakespeare’s work during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, in Britain, the United States, and Romania. (The printed volume was much bigger, carrying representative criticism of many other countries. All that we have deliberately left out, for reasons of space.) Among the writers whose texts on Shakespeare Leon Levițchi selected are: Ben Jonson, John Milton, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, A. Quiller-Couch, G. Wilson-Knight, Arnold Kettle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cezar Bolliac, B.P. Hasdeu, M. Eminescu, I.L. Caragiale, Liviu Rebreanu, N. Iorga, Camil Petrescu, Leon Levițchi, Tudor Vianu.

Together with the English-Romanian Dictionary (1974), the most comprehensive English Grammar (1962) in the Romanian language so far, the Translator’s Manual (1975), and all Shakespeare’s plays translated into Romanian, Shakespeare Criticism (1964) is a major project that Leon Levițchi set out to accomplish and brought to successful completion.

Since Contemporary Literature Press is a publishing house aiming at the study of the English language by means of literature, the publication of Levițchi’s homage to Shakespeare could hardly have been overlooked.

București, 1 September 2011

Lidia VIANU

(Romanian follows below)

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